


Fight or Run

by LittleSweetCheeks



Category: Madam Secretary
Genre: Angst, Confession, F/M, affair
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 05:22:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28898091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleSweetCheeks/pseuds/LittleSweetCheeks
Summary: He's not sure why this was the place he'd run to.
Relationships: Elizabeth McCord/Blake Moran, Elizabeth McCord/Henry McCord
Comments: 10
Kudos: 11





	Fight or Run

**Author's Note:**

> I couldn't help it, needed to set one free.

The rental car is beige, which he thinks is appropriate. He doesn’t really feel much of anything these days… beige will do.

The little coral colored house, he’s surprised to find, sits just off the beach up in the bluffs and somehow that feels appropriate too.

It took ten minutes to get from his front door to the parking lot at Ronald Reagan. Ten minutes to not think about what he’d done, what he was fleeing.

He’d only grabbed the overnight bag he’d kept at the ready for the past five years, too rushed to bother grabbing something more appropriate. But… What, really, was appropriate for fleeing your own bad decisions?

It had taken six hours to get his feet to touch down here and he had no plan, just an address scribbled down and shoved in his pocket. He’d taken the first car the rental desk had offered, he had no idea how he’d be welcomed and wanted a ready option for fleeing, again, if he needed it.

He sits in the car, staring up at the little house, for so long the front door eventually opens. The face that stares back is older but still familiar. Her hair is past her shoulders now and he can see she’d let it go gray. She doesn’t move from the doorway to come to him and doesn’t motion for him to come in, and he isn’t eager to step out of the car. He knows an impasse when he sees one, but he also knows he’s the one who will eventually break.

He has already broken.

He did the breaking.

Swallowing, he draws a breath, popping the latch and pushing the door open. The air is hot and heavy and smells of salt. He adjusts his sunglasses and just stands a moment, debating if this is the right thing to do or not. He suspects he knows exactly how she’ll respond.

She’s still watching him and there’s no smile, he wonders if she already knows. A phone call, or text even, takes seconds and he’s been on the move all day. There is no greeting, no invitation to come in, just her eyes on him. She looks softer than his memories, hair moving in the breeze and dressed casually, but her eyes are the same, they read him just as sharply.

A car passes, bringing him out of his internal musings and he begins to walk up the dozen or more steps, up the bluff to her door. To her side.

To face her directly and accept her judgement.

“I-” He cuts off. Now that he’s here, he’s terrified. He wants to fidget like a child, this feeling too much like confessing to his own mother when he’d done wrong, but then maybe that’s exactly what this is. He swallows again. “I did something.”

Her eyes never leave him. “I see that.” Her voice hasn’t changed either and he can tell she’s not very pleased with his appearance here at her door.

“I- I can’t go home.”

Her head tips to the side. It isn’t lost on him that he’s still out on the step. “And you thought you could come here?” Her words, her actions, tells him he was wrong to come here looking for something from her.

“My next option is to keep heading west and… And maybe no one will ever find my body.” He wants to die, perhaps not entirely figuratively.

“What did you do?”

And that’s the crux of it. He has to say it out loud eventually. Four little words. Granted, those four would lead to thousands more, but his sins could be reduced to four words.

He knows she’s thinking of all the times she’s talked him out of his own anxious panic in the past. “It can’t be that bad, Blake-”

“I slept with Elizabeth.” It rushes out, tumbles swiftly until it’s rolling and clanging around his feet. She’s frozen before him, staring as if he’d just claimed the earth was, indeed, flat. “I- I- I slept with Elizabeth.”

“… When?”

“The first time?” His voice cracks. His chest is squeezing now, and he can barely breathe. This tale is about to get worse and he can see judgement flash in her eyes. “We, um… We actually had sex the first time eight months ago.” But then, an affair is always about so much more than sex… “But things had been building to that point for a while.”

“…How long?”

His right shoulder rises and drops, and a guilty smile attempts to find a place on his face. “Years?”

She frowns and he’s ready to turn back to the car, but then she steps back. “Come in.”

Her house is meticulously her, which both calms him and makes him feel even more nervous. The furniture is somehow both beachy and mid-century modern and he’s almost afraid to sit, there’s no way he can even attempt comfortable. She vanishes into another room silently and he can’t hear anything, but then she always could move without a sound. He allows himself a moment of curiosity to take in the way this room is decorated.

“A drink.” It appears in his line of sight, startling him. She perches on the arm of a chair and for a moment it reminds him of sitting in her office, the way she would sit on a desk or table, the arm of a chair or sofa. “Speak.”

She’s barely spoken more than a couple dozen clipped words and he already feels as though he’s been lectured. “I- I don’t even know where to begin.” The first time they had an awkward-but-breath-catching moment between them? Or when things started turning physical?

“When did you sleep with her?”

That he can answer. “After the thing with the nukes.” He watches her brows shoot up and sighs. “It was bad judgement.”

“Obviously.”

“Once we crossed the line, we never… _un…_ crossed it.”

“But you already had feelings for one another.” Statement. She’s not even asking.

He nods.

“You… were already physical in other ways.”

He knows she knows how this goes. He nods again.

“When?”

“After…” He’s even less eager to admit this than admit anything else. “After Iran. She was… She was such a mess and at first it was little things- holding her, providing her comfort… helping her after a panic attack.”

“Things that were mostly your job but fuzzed the line.”

“She was drunk one night… about a year later… I was sitting with her and she… she kissed me.” He swallows. “She was having a really hard time then. They’d been a- away.” He meets her eyes only a second. “The week Henry’s father died.”

“I see.”

He wants to defend his involvement then. He’d been a little too close to drunk himself but had eventually told her they shouldn’t. “But after that… Things changed.” He’d feared they’d be found out, but apparently the one person who would’ve known what she was looking at never noticed. “There was more touching… more kissing… She never really cared about changing with me around, but after that… it was like she made it happen… I got to see her naked… a lot.”

She sips her drink and he waits, but she never says a word.

“By the time you left… we had crossed into other- other kinds of things.” He can’t look at her now.

“Such as?”

He understands now why confessionals have a divider, so you can’t see the other person’s face. Suddenly he wishes to be Catholic just to have that privacy as he confesses. “After you left that night, she uh…” He shifts in his seat, nervously smoothing his slacks.

She brushes her hair to the side, somehow managing both casual and authoritative at once. “Just spit it out. Believe me, there’s almost nothing I haven’t done somewhere in that building.”

The reminder makes him blush. This isn’t a boss anymore; this is someone he is hoping is a friend. “She said she had energy to burn before heading home… She, uh, she blew me at her desk.” That she doesn’t even blink at his turn of phrase makes him wonder…

“Sounds physical enough.”

“But it wasn’t sex.”

“Depends on your definition, I suppose.”

“I kept telling her we shouldn’t.”

“You _kept_ telling her?”

“I- I tried.” He swallows again. “I knew we should stop.”

“But you didn’t want to.”

“Have you seen her?” It slips out before he can bite it back.

“Wonderful breasts, perfect curves, and legs for miles… I’m familiar, yes.” When his eyes bug out, she laughs. “The difference here is I only fucked my boss in my mind… Well… that one anyway.”

“After the nuke thing… she came to my place.”

“Was it worth it?”

“The sex?... Possibly… No.” It wasn’t worth what was happening now. “Henry found out.”

“How?”

“He turned up when she hadn’t come home. I answered the door in not enough clothes and clearly reeking of sex.”

“Henry’s known eight months?”

“He thought we’d stopped after that one.”

“But you didn’t.”

Another head shake. “It opened the floodgates and we travel together so much, we’re alone together so much-”

“It was easy.”

“…Yeah.”

She studies him closely. “So, what brings you here now?” It’s clear she’s worked out that appropriate guilt isn’t it.

“Tomorrow morning she’s resigning.” That catches her attention. “She’ll be announcing her candidacy for President soon after.” He sees her eyes widen. “Henry gave an ultimatum. Him or me.” He shakes his head yet again. “He won’t live in the place where he’s watching us continue our affair under his nose and he knows… He knows a divorce now will end her campaign before it starts.”

“When did this happen?”

He checks his watch and does the math. “Eight hours ago?”

“I see.”

“My career is over.”

“And whose fault is that?”

“Mine.”

And then she asks a question he hasn’t asked himself. “Do you love her?”

“…No.”

“Did you _ever_ love her?”

“No. It- it was never about love. Just lust.” He’s certain it was never about love for either of them. It was about the thrill, the risk… the sex.

“Henry’s a good man for forgiving her.”

“I’m not sure he has.”

“He’s not divorcing her.”

“Until after the election results are in.”

“…I see.”

“I- I don’t know why I came here.”

“Commiseration? Absolution? Understanding?... I won’t give you any of them. I was wrong, you are too.” She’d never treated him with kid gloves, even when he’d longed for her to do so, so he’s not surprised with her words now.

“But… how do you live with it?” Maybe that’s why he came. He knows what he’s done, what he doesn’t know is how to live with it.

She waves around the house. “I live with my ghosts, in the silence. The waves speak to me when I go stand in the surf. Sometimes they tell me I’m okay, other times they remind me how I’ve failed.”

“I feel like I’m being crushed. I can’t go back to DC.”

“Then find a new life.”

“I used to be on top of the world… I- I used to help _shape_ and- and _run_ the world-”

“And now you’re nothing.”

And now he feels sliced open. “What comes next?”

“You make a choice… fight or run.”


End file.
